Archive for category: Andy Roberts

On 01 June 2017, President Trump took the first step on the road to reconsidering the best way to meet our climate challenges. By refusing to remain tied to an agreement with no means of fairly apportioning emission reduction efforts, the president has set in motion the opportunity to...

President Trump is reviewing the US commitment to the 2015 Paris climate agreement (known as COP21). He has publicly stated his intention to save the US coal industry. How will his actions affect the global coal market? And what knock-on effects will we see? Coal has the most to...

Donald Trump is rattling the bushes hoping to shake out additional support. In coal miners, he is betting that he’s found voters at odds with the Democrat Party’s anti-coal sentiment. The stakes are high in this presidential election, and the campaign promises are often higher. But are Trump’s goals...

China has been having its cake and eating it too. Mostly. Some central – and provincial – government policies have protected uncompetitive coal mines while other policies have supported non-coal energy development and environmental policy. As China’s economy slows and becomes more consumer-led, these policies are growing more contradictory....

Too much stimulus. Too little demand. A suspension of reason. Structural change. These are the elements of a coal market that finds its supply completely disconnected from demand. What lessons can coal producers learn from this? Hard experience has taught us that: Very high coal prices bring about increased...

Dear coal, In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, one character states “what’s past is prologue” reminding us that history is just an introduction to the future. So it is for you, and the coal producers and consumers who rely on you. No doubt, you feel assaulted by anti-coal forces. But, while...

Three short years ago, the conventional wisdom was both that growing thermal coal demand in Asia couldn’t be met by regional suppliers, and that low-cost coal from the US would fill the breech. Several new coal ports, notably in Oregon and Washington, were already in the early stages of...

Coal producers find themselves on the horns of an existential dilemma. Will they move forward just as they have in the past, absorbing yet more blows from a growing coal-averse community? Or will they transform themselves into a new kind of energy company, at least partly comprised of less...

To coal producers, 2015 must have seemed far longer than 365 days. From their perspective, as bad as markets were at the beginning of the year, and they were genuinely awful, they look positively effervescent compared to today. Coal markets now? Demand: weak. Supply: excessive. Prices: tumbling. Margins: emaciated....